Word: messala
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Judah Ben-Hur, Heston is still lean; he hasn't quite grown into the Greek physique he'd soon acquire. His thin face is dominated by a high, mile-wide brow, which made him a thinking-man hero - and, in his scenes with Stephen Boyd's Messala, Judah's boyhood friend and later deadly rival, startlingly intense. Gore Vidal, who worked on the script, said that the subtext was that the two men had once been lovers. Heston called that preposterous, but homoeroticism was potent in many epics of the time (oh, those Greeks; oh, them Romans!). Anyway, both actors...
...gesture at the Red Sea by holding above his head one of the 400 firearms he owned - a handmade Brooks flintlock rifle - and proclaiming that the Democratic Presidential candidate could remove that gun only by prying it "from my cold, dead hands." It was as if Al Gore was Messala, or the Ape King, or the Omega man's marauders, or a band of Comanches who needed a comeuppance of defiant rhetoric plus massive weaponry. The declaration assured that popular history would now remember Heston not just as a movie axiom but as the Holy Gun Fighter...
From classical times to today--roughly, from Ben-Hur vs. Messala to the Rock vs. the Undertaker--grudge matches have spiced the playing and watching of sport. Badminton? Fiercely contested by the Chinese and the Danes. Volleyball? Watch out for that Cuba-Brazil match. Swimming? You should hear the trash talking. Basketball? Everyone would love to knock our block off. Man was not automatically civilized simply because he agreed to live, or play, by the rules. He did not abandon rancor, envy or the thirst for vengeance. Just watch any match between Yugoslavia and Croatia...